


Her Kirtle Green Upon The Hill

by orphan_account



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Ballad 39: Tam Lin, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-01-16 12:00:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21270692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A GabeNath retelling of Tam Lin, because I listened to like 12 different versions of it the other day and it stuck in my head. So if you’re familiar with the story beats, you know what to expect, though it starts in a rather grim place with Gabe going off the rails after Emilie’s death, and probably won’t get better until chapter 3 or so.I’m writing this for NaNo and posting chapters whenever it feels like I’ve written a reasonable chunk of what happens next. Hopefully I will finish this because I know where it’s going, unlike those other two GabeNath things I’m writing.





	1. Chapter 1

Gabriel Agreste, Lord Papillon and Knight of the Realm, had always loved his wife to a fault.

Everyone warned him against it, of course. After all, he needed to provide an heir, and everyone knew that heirmaking was a dangerous business for wives. Better to marry a dutiful stranger and get your heir and spare on her, and to leave the loving to a woman you would never have to face losing in childbirth.

Gabriel had refused to face such a dull existence. He had fallen in love with his wife the moment he first saw her, as young Lady Emilie Leon on her first day in court, and he had loved her since, with a fierceness that remained unabated over the years.

That wasn’t to say that he didn’t worry. He had put off the business of getting her with child as long as he could, until the murmurs at court started to say that he should do his duty to the Agreste bloodline and set his barren wife aside so that he could find a new one.

By the next spring, Emilie’s belly was swollen with child.

He fretted the entire pregnancy, though doctor and midwife alike assured him that his wife was in perfect health and that the pregnancy was progressing as well as could be expected. And when the birth came, he was at Emilie’s side, holding her tight, bracing her for each contraction.

Emilie took some time to recover, but before long, both Emilie and the child—a beautiful boy with his mother’s sunny blonde hair and green eyes, named Adrien after Emilie’s father—were thriving.

Despite this, Gabriel swore to never again risk his wife in that fashion. He had his heir; he would raise Adrien to be the protector that the lands under his care required, and that would be enough.

He never expected that Emilie would be taken from him in a different fashion.

A patch of ice. A patch of ice, and an awkward fall.

That was all it took to end Emilie’s life, in the end. A patch of ice, an awkward fall, the brunt of the impact taken by her skull, and his Emilie was gone, taken from him forever.

He lost himself in grief at first, a sorrow so deep and drowning that it sucked all the joy from the world, a daze that found him sitting by the side of her tomb more days than not, tracing the shape of her face in the stone carving that adorned it, his son forgotten, his lands even more so.

And then his grief turned to rage, rage against a world that no longer made sense without his Emilie in it, rage against every person who had chastised him for his grief, rage against those who were saying that he could not mourn forever, that he must take a new wife. After all, he had his heir, but where was his spare? The scions of the Agreste family had grown quite thin on the ground in recent generations; who would hold his lands safe once he was gone? Question after question they had asked him, sharp and accusatory.

The rage drove him to drink when he was among other people for too long, so instead he took to his horse, riding the hills and forests of his lands, seeking out quiet... or seeking out those who flaunted the law, upon whom he could take out his rage without consequence.

There were some advantages to being the lord of the land.

At least, as long as he ignored the whispers.

“The Cruel Lord,” they called him now. “The Mad Lord.”

Gabriel could not bring himself to protest such names. Not when he knew they were true. So instead of lending further truth to rumor, he left his lands in the hands of his steward and his son in the hands of his tutors, and he rode.

His liege men tried to follow him, to keep him safe, but none of them had been born on these lands, none had been wandering these hills and woods since the day they were old enough to walk, and so, Gabriel always managed to slip away, one way or another.

He knew it was reckless. He knew it was dangerous. But rage and grief still coursed through his veins in tandem, driving him away, away from those who might have helped him regain some part of who he had once been, away from those who might have saved him from what came next.

He had made himself alone.

And very soon, he would regret that.

Gabriel woke, blinking blearily at the world around him. Everything hurt, from the sharp pain in his back to each ragged breath he drew.

He tried to remember what had happened, wracking his brain. He had been astride his horse, the last that he could remember. He must have fallen.

He tried to lift himself to a sitting position and cried out in pain. Pain, and terror, because while he could move his arms, everything below his waist refused to respond to the commands of his mind.

He had made a cripple of himself.

Gabriel snorted, and ran a hand dark with muck from the forest floor over his face. No, no doubt he had made a dead man of himself.

But what had caused his fall? He fought the fog that was obscuring his memories, searching for answers. He had been riding one of the narrow forest paths, and he had looked up...

Emilie. He had seen Emilie.

No doubt it was some ghost of a vision brought on by the madness that had seized control of his life. A flash of leaves, turning golden with the turn of the season, become his dead wife’s hair by a trick of the mind.

And now his son would be without a father as well as a mother.

Gabriel could not remember the last time he had seen Adrien. He could not even remember how old his son was these days. Was Adrien still clinging to the pudge and awkward steps of toddlerhood, or had he reached the age where children seemed to sprout a half-dozen inches overnight?

He would never know, and now, for the first time since Emilie had died, he regretted it.

He wondered what his son would think of him, when they brought his body back.

If they brought his body back. Perhaps the worms would have their way with him before his remains were found.

He stared blankly at the sky. Oh, let death come more swiftly than this. He fumbled with his belt, searching for his knife—but no, both knife and sword had been strapped to the saddle of his horse and were long gone.

Very well.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been a dead man in mind for quite some time, even as his body lived on. If it now took a little longer for his body to die than he had hoped for...

There was a rustle of leaves, and he cried out with all the strength of his damaged lungs, even as his hands sought for something to defend himself with. _He was not ready to die._

Something shadowed his face—a human shape, an unfamiliar one.

“Please,” he begged.

The shape came closer as the other person knelt at his side, the face resolving into one with high cheekbones and a pointed chin, with up-tilted green eyes the color of spring leaves and golden hair like warm summer sunshine.

It was Emilie. But it couldn’t be Emilie.

Unless...

Perhaps he was already gone, and she was here to bring him away from this wreck of a body he still inhabited.

“Give me your name, fair knight,” she said in her melodious voice, the words she had used when she had first come to court and he had been drawn to her side like a moth to the flame.

“Gabriel Agreste,” he responded, as he had then, “Lord Papillon and Knight of the Realm.”

He expected the next step of this dance, for her to laugh at him and call him far too formal.

Instead she smiled wickedly and seemed to reach inside his body, plucking something from the core of him.

She had asked him a question.

She had asked him his name.

Who was he?

That last he must have said out loud. The beautiful woman at his side laughed and stood and offered him a hand, pulling him to his feet as if he weighed nothing.

“You are Papillon,” she said. “And I am the Queen of the Fairies. And you,” she said beguilingly, tapping him on the chin with one slender, too-long finger, “are now a knight of my court.”

“Yes, my lady.”

He followed in her wake.

And he forgot Gabriel Agreste entire.


	2. Chapter 2

The court of the Fairy Queen was bright and shining. There, a banquet table laden with the choicest of foods, never empty. Here, furnishings embroidered in a million swirling colors, samite woven thick in gold and silver, the pelts of a thousand fantastical creatures and a thousand more. His fellow knights were a merry, joking bunch, beautiful and sometimes cruel with it, and it suited the cruelty that Papillon had allowed to seep into his veins well.

And the lords and ladies of the court...

Oh, the lords and ladies. They shone with an ethereal beauty that could not be matched by a single one of his fellow knights, the queen the most fantastic of them all.

_They were marked by an extraordinary cruelty, the queen the most capricious of them all._

She had many faces, his queen, but the one Papillon loved the most of all was the one she had worn the day she had brought him to court, with tilted green eyes the color of spring leaves and hair the color of summer sunlight.

_She had many faces, this queen, and the one he hated the most was the one she had worn the day she had brought him to court, because some part of him expected kindness where there was cruelty, gentleness where there was pain._

But no, he should not think of his lady so. His fellow knights had warned him not to, had told him to curry her favor in every way he could. Every seven years, they told him, one of the queen’s knights disappeared, paid in tithe to they knew not what on All Hallow’s Eve. And a few days later, she would replace them, and they all would continue on as if nothing had changed. Do what their queen wished, and he might survive, and even flourish in this place.

Defy her, and, well. Clearly that life of yours was of no great importance to you, was it?

That was the only kindness they ever did him.

His favorite thing was the hunt.

His queen would gather her court, lords and ladies and knights as one, and bid them mount their steeds (and there were always steeds enough for all, though Papillon never saw to their care when they were not in use, never saw them at all, and if these were horses they were not a kind he understood), and she would pin a silver bell to each of them, and they would ride, ride ringing brightly out into the world. “There!” the queen would cry out, her voice tinkling as the bells they wore. “A stag! Let us chase it!” and her retinue would go tearing through the woods in pursuit, until the creature dropped dead of exhaustion or was found and killed.

It wasn’t always a stag, of course. Sometimes it was a fox, or a bear, or a rabbit.

And once, on a moonless night at a time when his first tithe at the court had come and gone, when a second fast approached, it was a great black cat.

The fairy court never took anything from the creatures they pursued. What need had they of the tough meat of a stag, when a thousand more succulent dishes awaited them all at the fairy queen’s table? _(Never mind the fact that the food he ate there always soured his stomach hours later.)_ What need had they for a rabbit skin or a fox tail, when they had the downy pelts of unicorns to lay upon? _(Never mind that not a single one brought him comfort.)_

Still, when it came to this cat, Papillon wanted a trophy. It was his first kill as part of the hunt, his eyes quicker than any others at catching out the outline of the creature where it crouched above him on a branch, its pelt invisible in the dark of the night but outlined by the stars. It sprang for him as he spotted it, and he ran it through with his spear as it came, the surprising weight of it dragging his spear to the ground, where it stood there like a flag pole. His fellow knights surrounded him in an instant, congratulating him, mocking the poor beast which had died so easily.

“May I take the pelt? It seems a waste of such a beautiful thing,” Papillon said.

His fellow knights laughed, one adding “What need have we of the pelt of such a pitiful creature? But take it, if it calls to you so. It means nothing to the rest of us.”

Papillon turned back to the dead cat, but instead of the powerfully muscled body of the great black cat they had been pursuing, there lay the crumpled body of a young man, barely more than a boy. The boy’s golden hair fell in loose waves to his shoulders and his green eyes stared sightlessly at the sky, and one of his hands was clutched around the shaft of the spear, as if trying to draw it from his chest. Something deep inside Papillon seized, as chilled as the air around him.

His queen appeared at his side, gazing down at the boy, and Papillon could not resist asking the question that tore at his tongue. “Do you know who he is?”

“Some little lordling, in search of something he has no right to any more.” His queen smiled cruelly. “A pity,” she added. “I had hoped to gain a matched set, when next we paid our tithe.”

“A matched set, my lady?” Papillon asked, not understanding.

His queen laughed and turned to him, running a finger down his arm. “Father and son, my beautiful fool. Ah, well. I shall simply have to see who catches my eye between now and next Hallow’s eve.”

He still did not understand.

His queen turned her steed away and gathered them after her, and he turned to follow... but something drew his eye back, again and again, to the crumpled body of the boy. For an instant, he thought he spotted a figure in red kneeling by the boy’s body, just at the edge of his sight... but he blinked, and the figure was gone.

So was the spear.

He did not know it then, but from that day on, he could not bring himself to ever again pursue the hunt with the same fervor as once he had done.

And from that day on, he could never again bring himself to look upon the bodies of the creatures they had pursued once they were dead.

The hunt was not the only amusement available to a restless knight of the Fairy Queen’s court. There were the lords and ladies, of course, who made playthings of the Queen’s knights when she tired of them, and who would provide favors and gifts to well-liked companions. _(Best not to be liked too well, for the queen would snatch you back, either for herself or the tithe.)_ Sometimes there were musicians, or actors, or poets, brought from the world he had come from and made to perform at his queen’s whim. _(Best not to look too closely at their eyes, at the lost and scattered look there. Best not to think of those they left behind, when days turned to months turned to years and they did not age a day.) _And sometimes they went out into his old world, finding mischief to work upon unsuspecting human souls. _(Best not to think of that at all, if one had a heart left to feel.)_

A favorite place among the knights was a hill that every spring and summer bloomed thick with roses, luring young men with romantic intentions and young maids who could not resist the blooms. Oh, there was much mischief to be made in such a place.

That it was one of the few places in her realm that their queen did not like to stay long was an appeal of the place that none of them admitted to.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the snippets and bits of stuff I'd written for this but never turned into chapters, since this fic is probably never going to get finished.

Nathalie Sancoeur was trouble.

“Some day, Nathalie my child, you’ll find yourself in bigger trouble than being the daughter of a lord can get you out of,” her father would always say. But Nathalie had been full-grown for some years now, and she had yet to get herself in so deep that her father’s influence couldn’t save her.

* * *

"Well, there are the rumors about Carterhaugh."

Nathalie was paying proper attention now. She had heard no rumors about the place, and the fact that such rumors existed and she was unaware of them was a novelty indeed. And after all, it was a part of her father's lands, though a far-distant one, several hours by foot from the hall she called home. If there were rumors, she wanted to know them.

"Tell me," the old woman in red said.

Nadja cast a cautious glance Nathalie's way, and Nathalie pretended to turn her attention back to the stall and the embroidery thread it sold, even more curious than she had been. If her handmaiden was worried about Nathalie overhearing what she had to say, Nathalie was even more curious than she had been.

Nadja took a step away and took the old woman with her, and Nathalie had to strain with all her might to make out what Nadja was saying to the woman. Fortunately, she was familiar with the cadences of Nadja's voice, and could make a good guess at the words she couldn't quite decipher over the hum of the marketplace.

"They say that there is a fairy hill there, all covered in roses no matter the season, and that if a maiden tarries there too long, an elfen lord will come and demand a ransom for her release." Nathalie knew the hill Nadja spoke of, though it was nowhere near as magical as Nadja implied; the roses might bloom for more of the year than roses otherwise might, and they remained in leaf the entire year round, but they were ugly, scrappy things compared to the roses in her father's garden, and only fair to look upon if you had never seen a proper rose.

"And what ransom is that?" the old woman asked, not bothering to pitch her voice low.

Nadja shot a warning look Nathalie's way that Nathalie caught sight of out of the corner of her eye. Nathalie picked up a hank of green thread and made a pretense of examining its quality.

"Gold, if the woman wears it. Or her kirtle. Or..." Nadja's voice dropped almost below a whisper, and Nathalie resisted the urge to lean in the direction of her maid. "Her maidenhead," Nathalie thought she overheard her maid saying.

"Goodness. However can he tell?" the old woman in red asked, before laughing heartily at the appalled look on Nadja's face. "Thank you, young woman. I shall investigate and see if what I seek can be found there." She turned and walked away down the street, and Nathalie turned openly to watch her leave... only to start and turn back to the booth when the old woman deliberately turned and met Nathalie's eye, giving her what felt like a very significant look that Nathalie could not place the significance of.

Nathalie whipped back around to face the booth, where Nadja was giving her a disapproving look. "You shouldn't pay attention to such people," Nadja said, scolding. "She's obviously a madwoman."

"She seemed satisfied with what you had to offer her," Nathalie said.

"Never you mind that," Nadja responded, blushing. "Have you found the thread you were looking for for your embroidery?"

Nathalie placed the hank of thread back down at the booth, and the proprietor glared at her. "Not yet." She picked up another hank at random, a pale purple. "This will do. You will see to payment? I'm tired and wish to go home."

Nadja made a noise that Nathalie suspected was a stifled protest. "Of course, my lady," she said, her voice brimming with barely-suppressed insult. "Go home and rest. I will finish the rest of the errands on my own."

As soon as Nathalie could no longer see Nadja as she glanced back over her shoulder, she set off down a side street, winding around until she reached the edge of the town that abutted her father's keep. The edge of the town... and the road that lead to Carterhaugh. Nathalie had a few questions for the old woman, and no doubt she would be easy for Nathalie to catch up to; the woman had to be seventy at least.

* * *

The old woman was not easy to catch up with. Nathalie would have thought that the old woman had decided against the trip to Carterhaugh that day were it not for the glimpses and flashes, around bends or just disappearing over the hill, that she kept catching of the woman's peculiar red cloak, which was dotted with black spots that flashed and caught the eye like those of a ladybeetle and which was impossible to mistake. Very soon, Nathalie was covered in the dust of the road, sweaty and thirsty and almost ready to give up were it not for the tantalizing glimpses of that cloak she kept catching, just a little bit ahead. So instead of stopping or turning back, Nathalie girt her kirtle up above her knees and strode more freely down the road after the old woman.

Somehow, she had walked all the way to Carterhaugh before she had realized how far she had gone. Nathalie came upon the old woman, leaning against a fence near the home farm at Carterhaugh, and leaned next to her. The old woman soundlessly offered Nathalie up a flask, which Nathalie eyed suspiciously.

"Water," the old woman said, taking a swig before offering it to Nathalie again. "It feels like such stubbornness should be rewarded."

"Thank you," Nathalie said, her voice creaky and dry. There was something in the water when she took a sip... but just mint, she thought. It cooled and soothed her raspy throat. "I wanted to ask—"

"Do you know which way it is to the hill your woman was talking about?" the old woman interrupted.

Nathalie did, but she was suddenly feeling more than a little bit irritated with this woman. She handed the flask back abruptly. "It's a few more miles on. That way." She pointed across the fields in the opposite direction from the hill's location. "Thank you for the drink. I'll be on my way."

The old woman smiled at Nathalie, her eyes twinkling. "Did you have a question for me?"

"Not today," Nathalie responded, and turned her back on the woman, heading down the road to the side path that she knew lead to the hill of roses. She listened for footsteps in her wake, but heard nothing, though when she paused long enough to glance backwards, the old woman was no longer leaning against the fence... and no longer in sight at all. "Old bat," Nathalie muttered. "She must have gone the way I sent her."

Whatever the old woman had intended to discover on the hill at Carterhaugh, Nathalie intended to discover it first. She set out with renewed energy, making her way to the hill at a punishing pace.

Of course, once there, she didn't know what to do. She glared at the roses blooming on the hill. "Nothing special about you," she said grumpily. "Why would an elfen lord live here?"

The roses nodded back smugly on their stems, and Nathalie glared harder, and grabbed one, breaking it free from the stem with a sharp twist that still left her with a puncture wound on her thumb from a thorn.

* * *

Nathalie threw back her head with a haughty laugh. “What need have I for amaidenhead?”

Truth was, she had lost hers near five years back, to a traveling player who had wooed her with song. He had taught her many things, that man, from how to take her pleasure to how to keep her belly free of child, and she had loved him for it for the time they had been together. And over the years since, she had used those lessons well... and had come to the conclusion that a maidenhead meant nothing, when every man since assumed himself her first.

The last such lover had hated her by the time she had called their affair to an end. “It is only right that your family name is Sancoeur,” he had snarled at her as she cut herself loose of him. “Because you are heartless.”

“And you,” she had said calmly in return, “wished only to claim the status that making me your wife would bring you. But you will get no child upon me. Neither heir nor bastard shall I bear you. Now be gone.”

The man had turned tail and fled.

* * *

She had come again, his green-kirtled girl, striding onto the hill and setting down the bundle she carried with her. Though the kirtle she wore today was a faded, washed out blue, not green. It suited her better than the green, though better still would be a midnight blue.

Better still than that would be a scarlet.

He did not think he needed a reason to want to see her in scarlet.

She began plucking roses, assembling a bouquet, bold as could be for all that she must now know the cost of such things.

“And what shall it be this time, my lady fair?” he asked, pulling aside the shadows that hid him from the human world and emerging into the daylight at her side. “I have already had your maidenhead, so I’m afraid it’s your kirtle I’m after,” he added in a low, menacing voice.

She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think it would fit you,” she said steadily, meeting his eye, none of the warm blushes he saw so often on the faces of those who had been lured to this hill by the roses, only to be confronted by a fairy knight intent on mischief. “But you’re welcome to remove it all the same. It won’t hide the grass stains as well as the green.”

He needed no further encouragement. His fingers found the buttons of her kirtle and drew them loose, followed it with her underskirt and busked stays, seeking out the hem of her chemise and drawing it over her head. Even when he had her standing before him, as naked as a new-born babe, she did not blush. Instead, she met his gaze steadily, a challenging little smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You were no virgin,” he said, suddenly astonished.

“I did tell you that I had no use for my maidenhead,” she said, her smile warming her voice.

“Why did you not tell me?”

Her smile broadened, and somewhere inside his chest, Papillon felt as if something had broken loose and shattered.

“You seemed so intent on playing your little game with me,” she said. “I hated to disabuse you of those notions you held so dear.”

Papillon could barely breathe, so instead of trying, he reached for her, drawing her into his arms. Her fingers found the buttons of his doublet, and she rid him of his clothing as swiftly and efficiently as he had removed hers.

“I brought a blanket this time,” she murmured, her lips warm against his throat.

* * *

“What is your name?” he called after her.

She paused and glanced over her shoulder at him. “I know better than to offer my name to a strange man from beneath the hill,” she called back, a smile on her face. She made as if to turn away, and he called after her again, breathless and desperate.

“I am Papillon!”

At that she turned to face him entire, and dropped a mocking curtsey. “Pleased to meet you, Sir Butterfly. I am Heartless.”

He laughed as she turned away from him and strode out of sight. Was that a name or a description?

Would she come back again?

* * *

“I know who you are, my Papillon.”

Her lover froze at her side. “I do not even know my name. How could you?”

“Gabriel,” she said, and it was as if a shock had gone through him, many times greater than the small sparks her skin often attracted from woolen blankets and rugs on a dry winter’s day. “Gabriel Agreste, once Lord Papillon and Knight of the Realm, now dead and gone some one hundred and fifty years since.” She leaned forward, her arms wrapped around her knees, though the position was more awkward now than once it had been. “It gives me quite a thrill, to think I have been ravished by a ghost.”

Papillon let out a low moan and doubled over, convulsive sobs shaking his body, and though Nathalie had told herself many times that she should not care for this man, she found herself reaching for him all the same. She wrapped her arms around him from behind and simply held him as he sobbed, grief wracking his body as if it sought to shake him to pieces.

“I am here, my Papillon,” she murmured, pressing kisses to his silvery-pale hair. It was no surprise to her when his grief turned to lust instead, when he turned to her and sought out all the comfort that her body could offer, and which she gave freely. No small thing, to regain a name thought lost. No small thing to realize yourself but a shade in the world of mortal men, to know that all who had once known you were now dead and gone. Perhaps even a shade would seek this proof of life, given such a revelation.

He lay atop her once he was finished, his lips pressed to the pulse in her neck, his body limp and sated.


End file.
